Inside the Beltway

Dubya take

As this columnist was traveling around Paris last week, President Bush was welcoming hundreds of his fellow Yale alumni to the White House for a college reunion.

If only we could have been on hand to see the look on Dubya’s face when one old college chum, Peter, walked up to shake his hand.

Yale, we should remind readers, was still all-male in 1968.

Yet as Louise Casselman — who attended the White House reunion with her husband, Kirk Casselman — told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, one Bay area alum has since had a sex-change operation.

“You might remember me as Peter when we left Yale,” the woman told a shocked Mr. Bush when the two Yalies met face to face.

The columnist notes, however, that Dubya didn’t flinch, grabbed the alumna’s hand, and told her, “Now you’ve come back as yourself.”

Foreign affairs

Posted at the State Department yesterday was a notice that GLIFAA — Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies — will hold a brown-bag discussion Monday on “nontraditional families.”

That briefing will be followed Tuesday with a “happy hour with members of Congress,” Democratic Reps. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, and Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona.

Dose of prevention

As lawmakers move toward adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare, seven former Health and Human Services secretaries want Congress to go one step further. They want Medicare to focus more on keeping people healthy, not just waiting until they become sick before benefits kick in.

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